Student Profiles

Best engineering/technical project or product you’ve worked on:
Building a social network that aggregated video game data and recommended what to play next. The company culture made me looking forward to late night product builds.

Name

Imran Malek, MSEM ’15

Position

Solutions Engineer, DataXu

Education before Tufts

B.S. Biomedical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Work experience before Tufts

MocoSpace, Business Development Manager &
Vivox, Sales Director

Where were you in your career and what drove your decision to go back to school?
Recently, I decided to shift my career and industry focus, and I took inventory of both the hard and soft skills that I would need to advance in my current role and also achieve success in the future. I realized that many of the “hard skills” that I needed could be gained through self-directed learning, but I had a gap when it came to looking for insight into how to not only learn engineering skills but also lead other people who also have those engineering skills. As a result, I started looking for options in continued education.

Why did you choose to pursue a M.S. in Engineering Management at Tufts?
I went through the entire MBA process but I ultimately decided that taking the time off from my career and on-the job learning to pursue a degree that wasn’t going to give me hard skills that I can use in real-time both inside and outside of the workplace wouldn’t be the best way for me to move my life forward. On top of that, in seeing the curriculum, meeting the faculty, and meeting the peers in my cohort I realized that MSEM fits exactly what I need: a rigorous, technically focused curriculum that will give me a ‘leg up” as someone with good “soft skills” in business and nascent “hard skills” in engineering.

How do you balance the demands of work/family/school?
I actually have an advantage in this case as my wife and I are both in graduate school at the moment, so many of our “dates” as a newlywed couple consist of the two of us going to a coffee shop and writing papers, doing problems, and talking about what we learned in our respective classes to help reinforce our education. With work, I try to make the most of every single hour I’m at the office given the caveat that (barring extenuating circumstances) once I leave the office at night, all my work is on hold until I return in the morning.